UPDATE: [Graduate] Literature and the Body

FREE EXCHANGE - University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada28-30 March 2008

Literature and the Body:Inside, Outside, and Between the Skin

â€œWhy should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beingsencapsulated by skin?â€ Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs

â€œAnd the men stepped out in colours up to their necks, pulling wet hidesout after them so it appeared they had removed the skin from their ownbodies. They had leapt into different colours as if into differentcountries.â€ Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

The focus on the body in literature is nothing new to literary studies.As Judith Butler notes in her introduction to Bodies That Matter â€œcertainclassical tensions are taken up in contemporary theoretical positionsâ€(17). From the Renaissance to recent literature, the body serves as botha literal image and figurative trope to embody political, theoretical,cultural, sociological, and literary discourses that question theconstruction and deconstruction of identity. The portrayal of skin as asemiotic symbol complicates the epistemological framework of the body.What is the relationship between the body and the skin? How do the bodyand the skin resist confining structures of classification? Or as arguedby Claudia Benthien in Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self andWorld, how has skin become more and more an unyielding symbol?

This panel seeks papers on the body and the skin as sites for ideologicalinscriptions. How has the cultural and metaphorical significance of thebody/skin changed in literature, philosophy, theory, medicine, etc?Papers on the body, on skin, or combining both topics, are welcome.

Suggested topics for papers include, but are not limited to, thefollowing:

- texts as bodies/bodies as text- symbolic skin- politics of bodies/skin- performativity and the body- bodies as sites of cultural production- bodily Others- literary bodies (canonicity)- scripting skin/writing on the body- monstrosity/grotesque- history and the body- health/disease- abject/subject- collective bodies